The Road Home
by Little Bird
Summary: Spike must deal with the consequences of his actions during Chosen. Buffy/Spike. Spoilers for all of Buffy. Dark in the beginning, but not a tragedy.
1. Chapter 1

The Road Home

By: Little Bird

Completed: 24 October 2008

Disclaimer: No infringement intended: I own none of Joss Whedon's characters and I'm not making any money. I do own my original characters, however, so taking them to play requires credit. Hint, hint.

Spoilers and Notes: Spoilers for ALL of Buffy. This picks up directly after Chosen and assumes Angel (the series) does not exist. Completely AU.

This is a dark fic. I wrote this long ago and re-reading it now, I can't say I'm as thrilled with it as I once was. But I do like the ending still.

Act I

Only terror remained after becoming dust. That bright emotion gave the vampire no solace, just proof of continued existence. The sun surging through him had felt like a tangible manifestation of his night spent holding her: radiant, miraculous and frightening beyond his ability to reconcile. In the end, he had shown her the joy, which lasted until she fled at his insistence, but after that, it burned.

Until he fell face down in the dirt and a new kind of burning began. Hot and relentless in its torment, the cracked surface seared his skin as if exacting a long plotted scheme for vengeance. Surely he would sizzle like a worm on Los Angeles blacktop. But Spike just lay there.

His arrival in Hell did not surprise the former un-dead. In a time past, he would have thought it well deserve and even counted upon it. Now, however, Spike had other considerations. Refusing to accept the harassment of being cooked, he squatted in his mind like a transient guarding a dumpstered can of refried beans. Not much, but it was his. Had he succeeded? Spike remembered his dusting well enough to be completely sure of his own demise, but had he actually achieved anything by it? Or would it simply be a matter of time before he marched through the Hellmouth to Earth yet again on the wrong side of the war.

"I love you."

"No you don't..." What an moronic thing to say. Maybe she did not, but just the "Thank you," would have been apposite. But apposite and Spike were seldom synonymous.

'Can't ignore Hell, it's in my head too. Balls!' Spike thought.

"Hey asshole! You're holding up the line!" Some hick with a not quite Southern accent made him open his eyes. But that proved ill advised. Spike had not endured direct sunlight since his afternoon while using the Gem of Amara in pursuit of Buffy.

He screamed. Not a bad-ass, manly scream but wordless shrieking falsetto born of true pain and suffering. The intensity of the light forswore any image that might have formed in the brief moment his eyes had been open. Now he only knew white and unyielding noise.

"Fine, you stay there and rot, you miserable fuck. I'm going ahead of you." The nasally and cloying voice moved and Spike felt the unceremonious scrape of a cowboy boot across his sunburned ass as the man stepped over his body.

"Like hell you are!" Spike did not need to see the shit-kicker to seize him by the leg and hurl him to the ground. Fists seeking retribution for more grievances than Spike could hold in his mind at one time, the man's face became mush beneath him. The souled-vampire had no need to see the man for this job. Human anatomy had not changed much since he died the first time.

Spike did not give a flying sack of horse shit anymore. He was in Hell. The whole soul thing meant precisely squat. Here it presented a liability rather than an asset. He broke the man's jaw on one side and then the other. Deciding to knock his teeth out, Spike tried to grab the git by his hair, but he crumpled a Stetson instead. Grinning blindly, he jammed the cowboy hat on his head and felt enough shade to risk opening his eyes. Fangs rammed painfully through his gum line at the sight of fresh blood. He responded without hesitation to his ravenous hunger and drained the hick dry.

Spike licked his fangs and wiped his mouth on his singed and blistering wrist. More human thoughts returned to his brain as he hunched over the exsanguinated hulk. Who knew humans in Hell had blood? The hot wind sent vicious and biting rock chips into vulnerable flesh riveting Spike's attention to more practical concerns. The vampire growled and began undressing the body.

Fortunately for Spike, the hick's family had had the decency to bury him in a respectable business suit. It could have easily been different: a torn flannel and crusty jeans with the crotch scratched out, for example. The sunburned vampire tried to wriggle his toes away from the hot playa and decided that even the tasteless, over-done cowboy boots were preferable to burned feet. They might fit.

"Well," Spike said aloud, "I could wander around naked or look like a model for Men's Warehouse." He buttoned up the shirt.

"Too bad," French accent, rough neighborhood of Paris, early 1900's.

Surprise made Spike's fangs retreat with the usual sting and he looked up for the first time. Ahead of him, a single file line disappeared into the distance. To either side of the line, a perfectly flat desert extended to the horizon without variation. It vibrated in the heat. Some sand blew in little dust devils, but no hills, valleys or even rocks decorated the bleakness. Behind him, the line looked much as it did ahead: dejected people shifting their feet, kicking the dirt and not talking. The ones closest to him watched with discomfited interest.

The woman addressing him wore a knife rent bodice caked in blood and what smelled like sewage with part of a feather boa hanging off one shoulder. Her mini skirt failed to cover her ass and ripped fish-net stockings perched over broken off heels. "I was enjoying the view," she told him.

"Really," he drawled as he considered the broad for a moment. "Wanna be next? He was tasty."

She laughed, "I wouldn't if I were you. The line never moves by the way. Guess he didn't understand that. Rumor has it the badly behaved ones go down. "

"Pet, I'm a demon and I've got nothing to lose. The next level down in Hell doesn't scare me." Spike jerked on the pants. He left the sad bastard his undies because what lay beneath them was just too repulsive.

"Mmm, you must have just arrived. If you had nothing to lose, you wouldn't be here." She looked amused.

"I'm in Hell, what more is there to it?"

"No butter-nuts, this is Purgatory."

"Come again? Having trouble, 'cause of the accent."

"Pur-ga-tor-y," the whore stretched out the syllables as if that would be helpful.

Spike lowered his gaze to the body. "You mean I had a chance..."

"Yes."

The hick's suit jacket hung from Spike's fingers for a moment before the wind took it. It sailed briefly before tumbling along to finally settle in a pathetic puddle of shapeless dusty fabric.

"Bollocks." The nearly naked body began splitting in the heat.

One hundred and sixty two years later, by his best estimate, Spike woke up naked on a chilling marble floor.

His groan dissipated into the space around him. The room was enormous and empty. Above him hovered a high painted ceiling, but, when he turned his head the walls were father away than his eyes could see. The end of vision was a blur of color where the floor met the ceiling making a dark line at the horizon; like standing on a beach with the ocean stretching away ad infinitum. No columns supported the vast ceiling, much the way the sky hung above Earth without assistance. No sound reached his ears and the air did not move.

He tried to rise, but an invisible force held him tightly against the floor from the shoulders down. All of his muscles worked, but he could not move them from their current position. At first the scenes above him, painted in that gaudy and glorious Renaissance style, were unfamiliar. Meaning dawned slowly for Spike, though. His every moment from conception forward looked down on him in morbidly bright, gilded detail complete with plump cherubs and their sarcastic harps in a seemingly endless spiral.

Directly overhead, his sheet-strewn parents were in the process of making him amid a tangle of vines and scroll work. The sky in which they floated curled its black tendrils around their mattress of night-dark clouds. The artist, unfortunately for Spike, spared not the slightest detail. Their fluffy faces appeared sweaty from exertion. His mother's damp hair curled over the pillows spilling off the edges of the clouds. His father held her securely by the back of her neck and around the waist. Spike wished more sheets had been present for the event.

The dead vampire wanted to rub his eyes, but no attempt to move his arms would allow such a comfort. After a vigorous blinking, Spike came to an unsettling realization. The ceiling turned in a slow, queasy whorl. Just to his right, the focal point of the creepily swirling paintings looked like a dark whirlpool in an angry ocean. To Spike's dismay, one of the cherubs had sprouted impractically long fangs and was cheerfully beating its smirking neighbor with a shiny gold harp.

How could a painting giggle, let alone visit violence? The paint squished and smeared with the maniacal babies' movements as if wet.

Then the damn thing spoke to him, "To each a purple flight of Justice after the March of Days?" Mad laughter ensued as the cherub with demon-worthy canines clocked its companion in the head to send a flutter of snickering feathers ass over teakettle into the vortex.

"I thought I was sane." Spike muttered to himself.

"Again the seeing, just take the walk!" The cherub gave him a terrifying smile and brandished the harp in his direction. Its fangs dripped drool.

"Damn." He struggled against his invisible bonds uncomfortably to no real effect. The vampire began to have fond memories of the line in the desert with its endless stream of broiling sun and frozen nights. The mad cherub growled at him as if it could hear his thoughts. Spike stopped thinking obediently. It scoffed and stomped across its fluffy cloud on the edge of the dark void. Fat should not jiggle on a flat plane. Profoundly disturbed, he watched while the appalling winged baby take hold of a thick gold chain. It's downy little wings stood out stiffly as it yanked with all its might.

The vortex began to suck the first painting slowly into it.

The vampire watched deed after bloody deed, reliving his rather sad existence through a mushy fog that gibbered incessantly at him. Spike's sense of time evaporated. Most of the foggy ramblings were an unrelenting soliloquy on the very popular topic of guilt. It never shut up. The taunting and senseless ramblings of the maladjusted cherub were no help at all. The damned prat did every unspeakable thing with the harp that did not involve music.

The paintings oozed into the vortex even when he lost consciousness to sleep from either boredom or exhaustion. They slimed through his dreams unceasingly so he had difficulty determining the difference between sleeping and waking. Eventually the distinction vanished entirely. Eternity stretched away un-tabulated and it did not take long for resignation to set in. Madness took William the Bloody completely and he did not care.

When Buffy, with a nimbus blazing, glittering and throwing the light, entered his private parade of images the monologue of guilt became the deafening jeers of a mighty crowd. But by that time any meaning in the words was long lost. Only that vague sentiment remained, any other emotions were lost to the cotton-candy non-sequitur mess that was Spike's brain.

He woke with a yell. Absolute quiet reigned in his head and his voice faded quickly into the ether. Above him the paintings had stopped their slither into oblivion. The vampire's unnecessary breath halted.

The emissary of madness, the grotesque cherub, was for once, appropriately frozen in place. It gestured emphatically with its harp toward the painting. Buffy's nimbus caught the unnatural light and rainbows skittered around him on the floor as if the bright shafts radiating from her head were made of crystal. The rainbows even danced on the face of his painted self.

This day had embedded itself within his brain more deeply than any chip. And it would always hurt, never to be removed. The green and white tiles had been smooth and cool beneath his hand and the bruises had begun rising immediately where his skin had made harsh contact. Behind him, the plastic wallpaper had soaked quickly with his cold sweat. Her grey bathrobe, worn but comforting and soft, gaped obscenely. Rapidly darkening splotches and bright scrapes marred her violated posture and betrayed expression. He could still feel the fabric as he put his fingerprints into her shoulders. His longing for her body heat returned as he relived the creaking of her wrist bones when he had trapped her under his weight. The scent of her fear mingled with the dirt in her hair hung like an invisible fog in the wall-less room. It was as intoxicating to the dead vampire now as it had been then, but the result was certainly different.

Spike turned his head while he panted away dry heaves thankful there was nothing in his stomach to expel. Unable to avoid looking back at the painting, Spike noticed a change in his depiction. Epiphany on the face of his image where he had landed after Buffy launched him, the paint behind his head was a soft and sun-colored contrasting with the dull, patterned wallpaper. Some of the rainbows Buffy threw stuck like snowflakes to his nimbus making it sparkle like a weaker version of hers.

He had never questioned why all the paintings of Buffy showed her with a brilliant nimbus: she was the Slayer. But why would a soulless vampire at the single worst moment of his entire not-life suddenly sprout one? It was beautiful and it reminded him of the bobble Buffy had given him which had brought him here. He still had the brand on his chest from where it had incinerated his previous body.

The Slayer herself lay sprawled on her bathroom floor. The tears on her face, while paused in motion, glistened as if really wet. Spike remembered seeing treachery and hurt. But only now did he see the disappointment. She had, probably on some unconscious level, hoped he had grown beyond a soul-less, evil, thing through loving her. That had to be why she had not just sent him sailing across the room in the first place. Rather, she had wanted to believe he would actually hear her cries instead of being forced to rely on her Slayer strength to protect herself. Call Montresor.

"Can't hear you, love!" Spike whispered to her.

(His lack of soul had deafened him. Or was that just the excuse of a weak man? A true monster. So why the nimbus?)

"Lightening blinded you. You were dazed, stunned. Couldn't hear, couldn't see. White covering your eyes, clouds in your ears, crashing and rolling. Rumbling, whispering: go to Hell." Twisted gold staves pounded on the marble floor which boomed in response like a massive bell.

Spike flopped sloppily onto his stomach using all his strength to push his torso off the marble. Three blue-robed creatures stood staring down at him. Their completely hairless skin was perfectly paper-white and serpentine vertical green eyes, like emeralds, flashed at him catching light where there was none.

"Huh?" Spike's voice cracked and he wiggled to his knees, queasy. Muscles of jelly would not allow him more, even without the invisible straight-jacket.

"After the blindness faded, and the world again assaulted your ears, you knew this moment. It is an unexpected air current." Spike could not determine the gender of any of the beings and the lumpy blue robes gave no hints either.

"Doesn't make sense." He swallowed. "I have gone to Hell for more things than just this."

The three looked at each other, "This is not a Hell Dimension."

"Not Hell. Then where?"

"A place in between. Purgatory. You were wondering about the nimbus, just now. It is what brought us here. You have shown us, colorful, days up till now and we allowed you here so we must send you forward. Do you have anything to say?"

"Yeah, I fell in love. I _am_ in love. And I went to get my soul back, died saving the world. Bloody well oughta count for something."

"Mmm." They nodded like they were a hive mind.

"Yeah." Spike's diaphragm lacked the strength to emphasize his conviction and his muscles twitched with their fatigue, but he held their gazes anyway.

"We will consider your testimony." They disappeared.


	2. Chapter 2

**Act II**

Drops falling into fluid woke the vampire. Ropes chewed into his wrists and his tied-together ankles as they stretched him tightly above a pool. That smell could only ever be blood and it was his that dripped. Instead of the Seal of Danzalthar, the Satanic symbols carved in his chest dribbled onto a liquid tableau on the surface of the stone lined pond. The luminescent image floating in the blood beneath him provided the only light in the abandoned courtyard.

The broken stone benches littering the area reminded him of bodies with stretched skin drying and pulling away from eye sockets and gaping mouths. Dead vines blew in an icy wind from their crumbling statuary hosts. The statues themselves were emaciated ghostly shadows of once beautiful people at play. They still wore their flowers and frippery, but their postures and faces were twisted from starvation and some unknown horror. Still more bothersome, Spike thought some of them looked vaguely familiar, though he could not give them names.

The vampire forced himself to look at what he truly did not want to see. Below him in the pool fires illuminated the room. The fresh sword cut over his image's eye dripped onto the sweaty Slayer's face. With his hair and clothing in immature disarray, his likeness had his fangs buried to the hilt in the wriggling woman. Bleeding onto her from above the pool, Spike could feel the life draining from her hapless form as keenly as it had surged into his back then.

Footsteps echoed in the courtyard just beyond his vision.

"Never more than we are, but often less." Giles' voice was unmistakable and the tweed suited man walked beneath Spike to peer up at him. A familiar gold harp dangled from his left hand, but it had changed. Solid and no longer made of paint; it was also no longer baby-sized. Spike wondered cynically if the paint version had been any less solid than this one.

"The cowardly words of one has never tried." Spike informed him blandly. "I know who you are."

The Watcher stepped onto the raised edge of the pool. With a sweeping gesture, he sliced Spike from nipple to navel with a spire of the harp's ornamentation.

The vampire howled as his blood sprayed down onto the rippling image. He hissed several breaths after the initial shock passed. Looking at his chest, he could see several of his ribs appearing in the opening afforded by the gash. Oddly, that was the moment he realized he was wearing his leather pants and boots. He could not fathom why he would be clothed in a time like this.

The roar of a subway train pulled Spike's attention back to the reflection-like image floating beneath him. Now his blood made a little stream onto Nikki's face where she lay on the floor between the seats. His depiction was in the process of stealing her coat. Blood splattered onto her closed eyelids and she opened them to stare at him. The blood began to run down her face as tears and she spoke with Giles' voice: "You are beneath her."

"Doesn't look that way at the moment." Spike ignored Nikki in favor of growling at Giles.

"A costume changes you not at all, Spike."

"I got that one figured out, ponce. But I'm sure you haven't. You don't know what changes a man."

"Ready to find out?" The tip of the infernal harp's spire embedded in his abdomen tore any reply Spike might have had from his throat in the form of a scream instead.

Giles looked casually up at Spike for a moment before tucking the red and dripping harp beneath his arm and cleaning his glasses. The Watcher did not seem to notice that the blood on his hands only stained his handkerchief and smeared his glasses further. No words came from the vampire's working mouth as he struggled and bled.

"This is all you get. I'm listening. Tell me what happened." Buffy, ever the nimbus around her, spoke to him there on the floor of the church. Her image quivered in the disturbed liquid. Spike controlled his gasping to listen.

The Spike above bled on the Spike below who said: "I tried to find it, of course."

"You've never fit anywhere, did you learn nothing in all those years? Not human, not demon. Why did you honestly think a spark would make the slightest difference?" Giles walked around the lip of the pool looking up at him. The harp swung from his loose fingers shining red in the light of Buffy's nimbus.

"See here's what you never got. It doesn't matter a lick if it worked, if I ever fit. I could not continue to exist as I was, so I had to change course. There was no other way open to me. Did you really think I was so monumentally ignorant as to believe it would really work? I never did. Spark in me doesn't atone, doesn't make me more than I am. I owe a debt I knew I can never repay." He coughed and spit up some more blood.

"Why, why would you do that?" Buffy whispered to the two men.

"No forgiveness, no place in the world. Why indeed?" Giles and Buffy both looked up at him.

"Because I am beneath you." Spike murmured to Buffy's image. A new kind of wetness fell into the pool, clear and salty.

Giles chuckled and the image began to boil. The world inverted and Buffy's wet image rushed up to crash through Spike washing him in his own blood, tears and the light from her nimbus.

Spike opened his eyes to starlight shining above the courtyard. He lay in the now empty pool, clean of blood, wounds and the ropes that had bound him.

Her back to him, Buffy sat playing the gold harp: Pachelbel's Canon. A concert sized version of Giles' torture toy towered above her. The unfortunately familiar scroll work and deadly spires twinkled in the unnatural light. The Slayer's omnipresent and effulgent nimbus, nearly blinding in its intensity, shot rainbows into the darkness. She wore a fitted black leather jacket over her pale yellow sun dress and one of her flip-flops dangled from the foot that hung over the edge into the empty pond.

"You have no right to wear her face, you're one of them, like _Giles_." Spike growled emphatically.

"You shouldn't make assertions about what you don't understand." Looking over her shoulder at him, Buffy's voice did not quite sing to the melody of the harp, but its quality seemed to match.

"I understand just fine. You can't hide behind puffy clouds and moonbeams."

"Really William, am I the same as the others? Were they one person?" Buffy took her fingers from the strings, but the harp continued to play on its own as she turned to face him kicking both feet idly over the rim of the dry pool.

"Bloody hell if I know. But if you're not really her, you can't wear her face."

"She is part of me."

"No more mind games, I can't keep up. Just send me to Hell, if you haven't already, we both know I earned it." Spike sat up and leaned back on his hands. He looked away from Buffy's face. Completely clothed now, in addition to his pants and shoes he wore his habitual black tee-shirt with his red collared shirt over it.

"I'm not through with you yet." Her gentle tone mocked his better judgment.

"But I'm going to Hell when you are? Why wait?"

"Bureaucracy must be served."

"Soddin' whore!" Spike flopped back down onto the stone refusing to look at the tantalizing face anymore. "I've laid my soul bare for you to kick as you please, what more could you possibly want?"

"Quite a lot actually. But that's not really why we're here, at least not right now." Buffy hopped down from the wall of the pool and settled herself beside him. The harp followed her on its own to loom beside them on the stone snatching the vampire's attention.

"Enlighten me then, why are we here?" Suspicious of the harp, Spike kept it in view while pretending to make eye contact with her.

"Forget the harp. It is irrelevant."

"I disagree." She chuckled at him and began running her fingers through his hair. Spike lost himself long enough to catch her scent. Her leather jacket mingled with sun-warmed Buffy caused an unnecessary breath and he blinked hard. Wrenching himself from the mirage, he demanded: "Why am I here?"

She sighed and never stopped the movement of her fingers, "We have watched your entire existence, alive and not, watched your time here, listened to your testimony. Here's the thing about justice: it cannot be if the subject is never given the chance to surprise us." The thing wearing Buffy's face gave a delighted laugh at his expense and smiled disarmingly at him. "I love this job! I never get tired of it."

"I do."

"Naturally. Luckily for you, this part does end. What follows may not, so have a care how you treat me." Buffy began to explore the contours of his face with her fingers. Spike closed his eyes involuntarily at her touch. The warmth of her fingers suffused him and he craved her heat with the desperation of the dying. Spike rolled toward her curling himself into a ball, every muscle tense. He knew it was not real, but he was losing. "Shhhh. Relax. I'm not here to torture you."

"Yes you are." Her hands never left his head: fingers weaving through his hair, following the contour of his ear, leaving trails of heat everywhere they touched. Spike's fingernails cut into his palms as he responded to her against his will. "I will not accept from you what I can never earn. You are not her."

"The sooner you accept that I am, the better for us both."

"It's impossible," he growled through his clenched jaw. He felt her lay down beside him, radiating warmth like her nimbus was fire. "Buffy would never be doomed to this place."

"You don't know where you are."

"I have never been more certain of being in Hell."

"Spike, get a grip. I'm not in Hell." She grabbed a handful of his hair, not gently. He opened his eyes hearing Buffy's voice for the first time since she appeared. "It's really me, and you're the one who's not really here." The feel of her fingers on his skin soaked into his brain telling his every sense that this was, on some level, truly her. The vampire shook his head slightly, more lost than ever. "I'm asleep. I've been having this dream since you died. But this fountain has always been empty. No one here, except for the harp, which I suppose is kinda alive, in a dead sorta way. Giles says I'm stressed and trying to work through my stuff subconsciously. My shrink says I'm 'clinically depressed.' I just think I'm having a wiggin's."

Spike stared in shock into the bright face twisted with her own self-depreciative at humor. Before he realized he had moved, his head rested against her ribs, "Buffy?"

"You expecting someone else?" He found he could not separate this being from Buffy no matter how hard he tried even as he was certain this was part of the game. "'Course I'd think you are in Hell, you're a vampire." Buffy's face crinkled in a wet and vacillating smile. "Giles is glad you're dead. He doesn't say it, but he's glad."

"I picked up on that," Spike murmured and she looked at him askance. "He was here before, gave me a run for my money." He chuckled and leaned his forehead against hers. "So what's giving you trouble, love?"

"Giles didn't tell you?"

"That berk has never felt so cozy as to confide." The dead vampire began to feel mildly warm from their proximity. He kissed her cheekbone.

"Guess not." Buffy sniffled and snuggled in. "Two months ago, Willow committed suicide in my bathroom."

"Bloody hell, what Red go and do that for?" Spike scooted back enough to watch her face.

"Kennedy died almost a year after our battle with the First. Giles thinks she picked up something from the Uber-vamps. Infection. Long, drawn out, we couldn't fix her. Slayer strength wasn't an asset, in the end. It just took longer." Buffy coughed and leaned her face against his throat. "Willow lost it. Eventually, Giles took her back to England for more work with the Coven. We all thought she was doing alright, but when she came back to visit it was all exact-o knives and stained linoleum."

The vampire groaned quietly and sniffed her hair as he listened to her breathe. With his face in her nimbus, the intensity of the light overwhelmed him quickly, so he closed his eyes. Somehow he had thought it would burn, up close, but it just felt warm. "Sorry for the lack of thump-thump."

"Huh?"

"Heartbeat. Doesn't seem fair. I get to listen to you breathe, you're warm. But I've not got so much as a heartbeat to offer you."

"Heartbeat isn't everything."

"It's just one more way I can't comfort you. Being dead makes a fellow feel inadequate," he laughed almost inaudibly into her hair.

"Angel felt the same way."

Spike jerked his head back with a grin and her fingers slipped from his hair. "Who'd have thought that poof ever-" the vampire stopped smiling and clumsily scrambled away in revulsion. His back hit the edge of the pool and anger saturated him, "Son of a bitch! How'd you get me to believe? You're not her, get out of my head!"

"Spike. Did you go insane again? Are you talking to the First?" She glanced around the courtyard quickly. After her initial surprise, loss darkened Buffy's nimbus-illuminated face. He did not answer her. "And I thought this dream sucked before. Now do I get to do this over and over? You push me away in my dreams, just deserts or some such bull. How sick is that? Damn shrink will have a hay day." She sat sloppily cross-legged opposite him with wet eyes and a resigned affect.

Grief finally squished his chest and Spike sagged like a punctured tire. "I surrender. God help me, I surrender." Spike felt moisture escape his eyes. "You may not believe me, but I have always had a care how I treated her. This is Hell and I could not be what she needed. I was ever a poor poet but I loved her with a poet's heart.

"I could be neither a demon because I remained part man nor never a man because I remained a demon. I am still nothing and going nowhere. I cannot cry the demon out of me! God help me Buffy, I surrender. Forgive me."

The harp stopped playing. The thing wearing Buffy's face got up and began to pace in front of him. She sighed, "You found it difficult to ask."

"Yes." He watched her through his mist. "How could it ever not be hard to ask for something I don't deserve?"

"Deserve is indeed what is in question. I won't send you to even a lower Heavenly Dimension. You, as you so succinctly put it, are a demon. And yet, you are no good to anyone strapped to a rack and bleeding for eternity. This is my dilemma, demons go to Hell, no question, but what about a blood sucking fiend with potential?"

"How I hate that word."

"Beg pardon?"

"Nothing."

"As I was saying," The Buffy Judge glared disapprovingly, "There is something you could do for us."

"And why would I work for you?"

She shrugged: "Where would you like your immortal soul live?" The snide grin on her face sickened Spike and he wished she would quit wearing Buffy's face. Even Giles would be preferable. "Oh yes, you already think you should go to Hell, so that's not really adequate motivation, is it?"

"Sounds like there's nothing in it for me." He scoffed at her. "I go be your errand boy and then go to Hell anyway because, after all, I'll still be a demon in the end."

"I can't make you any guarantees. But would it interest you to know that Buffy, just now, told you a lie?"

"That wasn't Buffy, that was you."

"I am more honest than you think. That was indeed her, I just helped you believe it. She's been coming here for some time. It's fortunate for her that there is no mirror here, because explaining the nimbus to her psychiatrist would not be helpful. It's good that you didn't mention it." The Judge ran her fingers through Buffy's nimbus diverting the rainbows from their usual course. "What she thinks about yours, I'm sure you'd be interested to know." Her hand halted on the back of her head. "Eh, in the spirit of honesty, there is a mirror here, just not one she can use."

The vampire rolled his eyes, "What do you want and what do I get out of the deal?"

"Always to the point. We are concerned about the changes she made to the balance and, as things are now, that balance is at risk. You assist us to maintain the balance and when we see you next, we will review your case again."

"So it's go to Hell, or do this again. What if I just don't see the difference?"

"That's really not my concern."

"Uh-huh." Spike got up and wandered around her in the confines of the pool till he reached the harp. He ran a fingernail across the strings in a sweeping motion and then gasped.

"Not quite what you thought, I take it."

"I-" he swallowed. "I'll go."

"Nothing like finishing a case to go with my evening tea. So be it."

Spike started to growl at her but he was already falling.


End file.
